from boobsdontworkthatway.tumblr.com

• Comic and fantasy artists, and their fans, have long been stereotyped as guys who don’t know anything about women. Here’s visual evidence supporting the allegation, in a blog entitled “Boobs Don’t Work That Way.” (And here’s some advice from artist Max Riffner on how to draw women as if you paid attention to them.)
• Wu’s boo-boo puts Wu in deep doo-doo.
• If all-electric cars take off, how will we make and distribute the electricity needed to run them?
• Author Robert S. Becker is one of the commentators who sees the ideological roots of American conservatism in the heritage of the Deep South, in its economy of big corporate farms led by self-styled “rebels” and operated by cheap and/or enslaved labor.…
• …while Paul Krugman has had it up to here with the myth that there’s a “centrist” silent majority, made up of “swing voters” who somehow happen to completely agree with the D.C. pundit caste.
• Phony debt “crisis” conspiracy theory of the day: Are Republicans luring Obama into unilaterally raising the debt ceiling, as an excuse to impeach him?
• The post-lockout Seahawks will do without the star quarterback who stayed a little too long.
• Councilmember Nick Licata would like a city park dedicated to Seattle writers. I might have a snark about this a little later on.
• This year’s Burning Man festival in Nevada will be the last. Now, all the Seattle artists who only show their work at Burning Man might have to actually exhibit it to (gasp!) locals.

• Among the Plan Vs, Plan Ws, and Plan Xs to resolve the Republican-invented “debt ceiling crisis” (which, as pundit Eric Byler notes, is “as fake as professional wrestling“) is a joint House/Senate committee that would have extra-ordinary powers to shape legislation that the full bodies would not get to amend. Huffington Post calls it a “Super Congress.” Now if we only had a “Super President,” like the one in a 1967 TV cartoon of the same name. (Yes, I am old enough to have seen the show during its one network run, and yes, I did.)
• Speaking of fantasy entertainments, Hong Kong scientists claim their tests with photons prove nothing can go faster than light. Then, they extrapolate from that to claim that therefore, time travel is impossible. Well, there are any number of Whovians who would argue about that.
• The King County Council failed to vote on Monday about the utterly necessary plan to save Metro Transit. Let’s hope the delay means enough votes are being attained.
• Who (heart)s, or at least partly defends, the Oslo terror killer? There’s Glenn Beck. And there’s a Wall St. Journal op-ed imploring its readers not to let a little thing like a mass murderer dissuade them from the true paths of racism and Islamophobia. Andrew Sullivan, meanwhile, identifies the shooter as an example of “Christianism,” which he defines as “the desperate need to control all the levers of political power to control or guide the lives of others.”
• Good news for all of us who’ve been totally bummed out by the Mariners’ record dive—turns out there will be pro football this year after all.
• If you’re going to the UW campus, don’t masturbate in public. Leave that to the profs.

vintage 1940 trolley bus from seattletransitblog.com

• Today is the day. Speak now or forever lose your ability to get anywhere in King County, with or without a car. That’s how big this is. Get thee to the King County Council Chambers, 516 Third Ave., 6-8 p.m. Speak out to save transit.
• Is local weather really getting “wetter and warmer”? Cliff Mass says not necessarily.
• After the state failed earlier this year, the city may strike out on its own to license and regulate medical marijuana establishments. The first regulations I’d want: no pot-leaf neon signs, no tie dyed scrubs, and no public display of the phrase “da kine.”
• City Councilmember Tim Burgess wants the big public todo about child prostitution to become a little less about the rival grandstandings of celebs, politicians, and publishers, and a little more about the children themselves. At least that’s what I hope Burgess wants.
• The Thunderbird Motel that became the Fremont Inn, one of the notorious drug-dealer-infused motels on Aurora shut down a year or two back? It could become Catholic-run low income housing.
• The state’s sending up helicopters to test local radiation levels. But don’t panic, officials insist.
• The old idea to put up a surplus 60 foot Lava Lamp in the tiny Eastern Wash. burg of Soap Lake? It’s on again.
• You might not have heard of it yet, but there’s a longshoremen’s protest at a new grain terminal in Longview, where management has hired nonunion workers. A recent protest got 100 union dock workers and supporters arrested.
• A Daily Kos diarist compares the continuing nonsense over the federal deficit to “worrying about the water bill when the house is on fire.”
• Time claims Americans “distinguish toiler paper brands better than banks.” Insert snarky comments here.
• What are the chances that l’affaire Murdoch could cause the decline and fall of the Fox “News” Channel? Not much, I believe; at least not directly or right away. Murdoch’s UK papers used grody methods to amass information about politicians, celebrities, the royal family, and even violent-crime victims. Fox “News” doesn’t give a damn about information; it just makes crap up.

(Slow news day edition.)

• In case you wanted another reason to cuss Boeing’s current management (besides paying no taxes whilst living off the Pentagon teat), Glenn Hurowitz at the local eco-zine Grist chides ’em for falling behind Airbus in the race to make more eco-friendly aircraft. Then he cites this as just one more example of Boeing’s corporate ball-dropping:

Boeing is still paying for abandoning its once-successful strategy of long-term investments in innovative, groundbreaking products like the 747 jumbo jet in service of short-term profits meant to goose its quarterly earnings.

• Longtime readers know I almost never quote NPR here. (Heck, I almost never listen to that marathon snoozefest of self absorption.) But here’s a neat little item by them about “how much does it cost to make a hit song?” The song in question is a producer-driven Rihanna track. As one web-page commenter to the story noted, nowhere in the entire piece is the word “musician” uttered. Indeed, nowhere is it mentioned how any non-vocal sounds on the recording are created.
• If there were still going to be daytime soaps, here’s a new potential plot chiché for them: frozen fertilized embryos. Siblings conceived at the same time but born years apart.
• David Swanson thinks he knows how we actually could get Clarence Thomas off the Supreme Court…
• …while Ezra Klein’s got a handy rhetorical device for following the federal debt-ceiling debate hoohah. Whenever a Republican is quoted blathering about “taxes,” replace the phrase with “blowing up the moon.”

• Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer said he’d like to be involved in an effort to bring men’s pro basketball back to Seattle. But, he claims, there’s a “real estate problem.” This problem can only be solved with a new arena, which would cost $300-500 million. KeyArena, Ballmer asserts, is too small; though it’s actually well in the range of NBA arena capacities. What it lacks are more luxury boxes and an NHL-friendly hockey configuration. Ballmer also apparently didn’t mention that as long as the City of Seattle owns KeyArena, it won’t subsidize a new building that would compete for concerts and other bookings. Even if the city had the money, which it doesn’t. (Question: Could KeyArena be expanded again without knocking down the nearby Northwest Court complex?)
• For decades, University of Washington administrators have chafed at the presence of all those pesky college students walking around, diverting time and attention away from the world-class-research-institution stuff the administrators would much rather focus on. Now, the current UW bigwigs have come across a solution, in the form of a whoppin’ 20 percent in-state tuition hike. Students plan to protest.
• The federal government has indeed sold the former Rick’s strip club building. And yes, the new owner will probably open another strip club there.
• Howard S. Wright, the construction giant that built the Space Needle and Columbia Center, was sold off to a Texas company.
• Could it really rain more at airports?

(Note: As was the case during my earlier flirtation with morning headlines circa 2007, these won’t necessarily appear every day.)

• Scientific American looks at scare stories claiming a pandemic of Fukushima-related infant deaths in the northwest US (i.e., here). Their conclusion: unneeded fear mongering “supported” by highly selective statistics.
• Still want something to fear? How about the “Big One” earthquake? Some folks at some conference in Portland say there’s a 10 to 15 percent chance of it showing up in the Northwest sometime in the next 50 years.
• Want an ultimate example of gay-related “You’re Doing It Wrong”? How about hating the commercialization of the gay pride movement, and using that as a lame excuse to trash storefronts (including many small businesses as well as chains) on Capitol Hill?
• Emerald Downs had a “horses gone wild” episode. Four humans were hurt, one really bad. One of the two horses involved was “put down.”
• Our ol’ pal Michael Upchurch had a SeaTimes review of a bio book about Zoe Dusanne, one of the unsung heroes of the Seattle art-gallery world. She was an African American woman entrepreneur who helped promote those 1950s “Northwest School” painters, and brought works by the NY/Europe big boys here alongside them.
• Sometime Seattleite Timothy Egan wrote a white-boomer-centric ode in the NY Times to the recently deceased Bruce Springsteen sideman Clarence Clemons. (During Springsteen’s peak years, Clemons was the only living black musician on many “album rock” radio stations’ playlists). At the Collapse Board site run by ex-Seattleite Everett True, writer Scott Creney gently yet thoroughly demolishes Egan’s anglocentric ode:

He says well-meaning things about whites stealing rock and roll from blacks — no mention of hip-hop though. Or what Clarence might have thought about playing to arenas and stadiums filled with next-to-zero black people. (Springsteen’s audience is pretty much exclusively white.) Or, for that matter, how Timothy felt standing in a room full of white people congratulating himself on America’s ability to successfully and peacefully integrate itself, due solely to the fact that there was a black guy in the band playing saxophone.

After word slowly leaked out that the situation at Fukushima is, or at least was, direr than officials originally acknowledged, the fringier-fringy “news” sites are spreading unsubstantiated scare stories about the Fort Calhoun nuclear plant in Nebraska, a site recently surrounded by floodwaters. Here’s a more plausible report of what’s going on there, from an unofficial but knowledgeable source.

Last November, Capitol Hill resident Ferdous Ahmed appeared in a full page photograph in City Arts magazine. He was dressed to the proverbial nines in a vintage black suit, top hat, sunglasses, and high-top boots, accessorized with a gold pocket watch.

A lifelong vintage-wear fan and collector, Ahmed had just opened a boutique on East Olive Way the month before. It specialized in outfitting “steampunk” afficianados in suitably outlandish retro costumery, with garments and accessories mixed and matched from assorted real-world times and places (though mostly of a Victorian sensibility).

Ahmed’s boutique, Capitol Hill Vaudeville, is gone now.

The Solara Building, where the store had been, is mostly vacated (except for a tattoo studio). Entrepreneurs Shanon Thorson and Laura Olson (the team behind Po Dog on Union Street and the Grim bar on 11th Avenue), in partnership with Alex Garcia (Emerson Salon, Banyan Branch Marketing), are turning the place into The Social, a mammoth (3,000 square feet) gay bar and restaurant. Construction crews are now reshaping the building’s interior to sport a dining room and at least four semi-detached bar areas.

Olson and her partners are keeping the tattoo studio on the premises during the construction period, and say they want to bring back some of the building’s other former tenants (including a hair salon and a role-playing game store) in its peripheral spaces.

Ahmed’s boutique, though, might not get invited back. It was just getting off the ground as a business when it got sent packing. Harem, another clothing shop that had been in the Solara (and had previously been in its own storefront on Broadway), is definitely not returning; owner Victoria Landis has held her liquidation sale and is moving on.

Two features had made the Solara ideal for merchants like Landis and Ahmed.

The first was the interior flexibility of its main floor. It featured a big open space, where the gaming store could hold tournaments and the boutiques could hold fashion shows and receptions, without having to pay full time for the extra square footage.

The second was the relatively low rent. None of the Solara’s tenants had its own street-facing storefront. Without this means to attract casual foot traffic, in a building that was already set back from the street by a small parking strip, the tenants had to draw their clientele with clever promotion to identifiable niche markets. The building’s low rents were priced accordingly, to allow these specialty destination spaces to exist.

But a couple of alt-fashion boutiques and a gaming parlor just can’t bring in the kind of money a destination restaurant, and especially a bar/nightclub, can potentially generate.

Thus, the Hill is getting a new, high profile gay club. Olive Way, in particular, is getting another stop on what’s quickly shaping up as the Hill’s next major bar-crawling scene.

And we’re losing an experiment in providing urban spaces for highly specialized retail, the first experiment of its kind here since the Seattle Independent Mall (on East Pike a decade ago.)

Any “artistic” neighborhood needs some cheaper spaces within its mix. Spaces where the unexpected can happen, where new subcultures can form, where new concepts can germinate.

I was reminded of this when I read the University of Washington Press’s new essay collection Seattle Geographies. One of its longer chapters is entitled “Queering Gay Space.”

The chapter’s authors (Michael Brown, Sean Wang, and Larry Knopp) noted that Capitol Hill hadn’t always been the region’s gay culture nexus. In the first half of the last century, gay and lesbian bars, cabarets, and residential homes existed, with varying degrees of “out”-ness, mainly in Pioneer Square, plus a few scattered spots throughout the downtown core and in the University District and Queen Anne.

But when gay pride first really took off in the early 1970s, the Boeing Bust had depressed housing prices throughout the region. The Hill’s housing prices were further held back by what the essay’s authors called “white flight and fears of inner-city decay.” That gave the Hill a “large number of affordable apartments and rooms in shared houses,” which “drew young queer baby boomers into the area.”

The Hill’s desirability as a place to live, aided in part by then-low housing costs, helped spur its growth as a place for gay businesses and hangouts; and also as a place for bohemian art, theater, and fashion scenes.

Thus, four decades later, it can sprout a venture as monumental as The Social.

(Cross posted with the Capitol Hill Times.)

Yes, the Animation exhibit at the Pacific Science Center is one big ad for Cartoon Network.

But it’s also educational. Really.

You see, animation (even CN’s unapologetically 2-D animation) involves a lot of math, geometry, spatial relationships, optical theory (“persistence of vision”), and maybe even a daub of artistry. And that’s even without CGI. (For the purposes of this exhibit, CN’s shows are billed as being produced in traditional cel animation; in reality, even something as simplistic-looking as Code Name: Kids Next Door uses a lot of digital compositing, coloring, and assembly.)

…your UW taxes don’t pay off. Why, a research at the grand old You-Dub’s working toward hi-tech superhuman vision!

…to love one of my alma mamas: Oregon State U. researchers have found beer can fight cancer!

• You won’t love it at Levitz anymore. The discount furniture chain, which has teetered in and out of insolvency for several years, is finally throwing in the seat cushion.
• Safeco Insurance has fulfilled its duty to propping up the downtown real-estate biz by moving into two existing downtown Seattle office towers.
• I-5 in southwest Washington is slowly reopening in stages. Meanwhile, receding floodwaters leave what P-I headline writers call a “Deluge of sewage.” Say that five times fast.
• A Federal Way sixth grader has invented a device using kitchen gloves and semi-porous plastic bubbles, which can inject medicines into the body without needles. Just the thing for squeamish junkies everywhere.
• Yep, King County’s fully, officially, joined the housing-price bubble “pop.”
• And there’s a fun story about professional horse’s ass Tim Eyman getting into a hissyfit at a Yakima city council meeting and getting forcibly removed.

• Two suburban high school teachers took part in an antiwar protest. The administration wants to punish ’em. Students are rallying around ’em in support.
• It’s the first, probably exaggerated, snow scare of the season.
• How not to hide pot in your car: Package it as a Christmas present.
• The tragedy surrounding the failed UW-devised AIDS vaccine moves further from “noble failed experiment” toward “real scandal.” A UW researcher allegedly faked test data and altered lab images. (The researcher in question was conducting AIDS-related research not directly related to the vaccine trials.)
• Reverse-sprawl dept.: Ski maker K2’s moving its head offices from Vashon Island to south Seattle. The products will still all be made in China.
• The SeaTimes posits two Eastside transportation solutions: Add passenger rail, cancel plans to widen I-405.

This is what happens to local celebs who move to LA intending to enjoy the A-list lifestyle. An author who’s either Bill Nye’s ex-wife or ex-fiancee vandalized his backyard garden with an OD of weed killer. He charges she was trying to poison him; she says it was just a psycho-moment’s prank, and that she’d only wanted to destroy his flowers.

UW scientists say they can alter poplar trees with rabbit DNA to create pollution-sucking trees. According to a P-I piece, these Frankentrees can “naturally render a list of cancer-causing pollutants–benzene, trichloroethylene (TCE), vinyl chloride, chloroform–non-toxic.”

Now, let’s have these PoMo tree surgeons create plants that could do something really useful, like ridding the indoor air of cheap perfume stink, or even patchouli.